by Emily Skaja
I become a ghost. I speak now to the future
generation of depressives—that’s you. See me levitate
your latte. Write DUMP HIM on the shower glass.
I’m appeased by small tributes. Nothing too flashy.
The late October smell of burning off the dust
in the heat vent. That soft, numb feeling
of dragging your hand down a chain link fence.
When you wake up & only your nose is cold.
That’ll do. This is what it’s like to be haunted
by a Midwestern ghost. You think you’re alone
when your car is stuck in a snow ditch,
but then ghost mittens start digging you out.
I’m closing your bar tab, fixing your typos,
signing your enemies up for political spam.
Every thirty minutes, they’re getting a new one
that says Enemy please, you’re our only hope!
That’ll keep ’em busy. I always wanted to be
a mom like this. To a kid like you. You:
hungover, sad, sleeping through your thirty-seventh alarm.
Missing the way the light stripes the floor.
You’re so broke you can’t afford lipstick
& I’m there in your inbox, hissing at Sephora
not to bombard you with their trifling sales.
I know what it’s like to want a little something.
Like Plath, who loved “the thingness
of things.” She wanted to live in Yeats’ house
& whatever his ghost did or didn’t do for her
is a matter of little scholarly attention,
but don’t you worry, I’ve got your back.
At your age, I wanted to dive into a black lake
out of curiosity, to see if it would drown me.
I had an idea that if I swam down far enough
I would pass through a portal into the brightest
light. Another lake of sparkling, opalescent water
clear as anything, & I would be happy, floating.
All my life, when I was happy, I was dismayed
by the knowledge that I was somehow
doing it wrong. A real happy person
would know how to hold joy in their arms
delicately, not like a bouquet of hornets
they were looking to chuck into the fire.
I was pretty sure I had swallowed all the darkness
in the universe & now light couldn’t touch me
even if it tried. That’s probably why I’m a ghost,
whispering to you like a fizz of soap in the drain.
But you, you have your whole life to sort that out.
This is just one stupid winter. You think this
bleak-ass cinderblock weather has the power
to fuck with you, an actual living breathing miracle
in week-old sweatpants? Yes, it is possible
to be miserable forever, but misery can be
interrupted by weird little stripes of light.
Emily Skaja is the author of BRUTE, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. She is the founding editor of the Poetry Prompt Generator, an online resource for poets and educators, and she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis.